News & Announcements

Andrew Potozniak, a hobbyist indie developer and creator of Hexzled, is planning a first of its kind coding challenge for Corona developers!

CoronaBlitz is a coding challenge where you are given a theme and 4 hours to complete a basic game. Yes, that’s right, 4 hours TOTAL to complete a game. The first Blitz runs August 16-25; learn more about the challenge in Andrew’s guest post.

In mid-May, we tasked Corona developers around the world to submit a Corona SDK sample game centered on Dilbert, the cartoon hero known for his satirical office humor.

From May to July the submissions poured in and the games we received all told a rich story of not only the power and diversity of Corona SDK, but more importantly, the talent and creativity of Corona’s community. Needless to say, the content shift in the gaming marketplace has already taken place, and you, the developer are a major part of this equation.

Fifteen years ago, Apple made a tough decision to cancel the Newton, Apple’s first foray into handheld computing. There was a lot of promise in the individual parts, but they never came together to something great, like they ultimately did with the iPhone.

After long deliberation, we’ve come to feel the same way about Corona Cloud. We aimed high but like the Newton, Corona Cloud in its current form has been a disappointment. While there were islands of potential, the ultimate execution of the product did not meet our standards.

Last week, Apple announced iOS7 Beta at WWDC. A lot of cool stuff was shown. The interesting thing is that a lot of the “flat” UI that was demonstrated was exactly the kind of thing we saw some of you already creating using Corona’s graphics system.

Today, we had some very special guests visit the Corona office: game legends John Romero and Brenda Romero.

It was really inspiring to meet them. Together, they’ve had a profound influence on the industry that still reverberates today. John designed such seminal games as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, and co-founded id Software which holds a near mythical place in the pantheon of game development.

In Corona‘s graphics model, groups have been the workhorse way of organizing objects hierarchically. When you modify a group’s properties, the children are affected. For example, if you set the alpha on a group, then each child’s alpha is effectively multiplied by that alpha of the parent group.

The new graphics engine is going to have a new kind of group called a Container.

It’s great partners like these that enable Corona developers to access the best new functionality and 3rd party services. In particular, today’s batch span a wider variety of services from app advertising to cross-promotion and value-exchange ads, from social campaigns to game controllers.

We’re happy to announce that support for Google Play game services is coming very soon to Corona. We worked with Google to get early access to their services and also with Chip Chain, a great Corona-based app, that supports the new functionality today. Read on!